Help Desk Escalation Support Group

You have trained your Help Desks Agents with support skills, your knowledge base is full of solutions, and you First Contact Resolution percentage is seventy percent or better. This still means that thirty percent of all Help Desk contacts (phone, email, and other means) are escalated to another group. What is a Help Desk escalation support group and how does that work?

How does a Help Desk Escalation Support Group work?

If the Help Desk Agent is unable to solve a ticket, the ticket must be able to quickly and easily be passed on to an advanced support group called an escalation support group. An escalation support group is the second level and above support groups that handle more complex issues originating from the Help Desk. These groups include the system administrators, engineers, and developers responsible for the maintaining service.

Help Desk Escalation Support Group Examples

Typical escalation support groups are made up of Network, Security, Infrastructure, Procurement, VOIP, and Desktop Support departments. Engineers from those departments are members of that escalation support group identified in the Help Desk ticketing application. The industry best practice for assigning tickets to these escalation support groups is to assign the ticket to the escalation support group queue and not directly you a member of the queue. The reason for this is the Help Desk Agent may not know if a specific engineer is on vacation, overloaded with other tickets, or just not available. Assigning the ticket to the escalation support group queue will allow all members of the queue the ability to see the new ticket. An available engineer will then be able to take ownership of the ticket.

Help Desk follow up with customers

The escalation support group engineer should document all support provided into the ticket notes field. This will allow the Help Desk Agent validate that progress is be made and understand how in the future another similar issue can be resolved. Finally when the issue is resolved, the Help Desk Agent should make contact with the customer to validate the resolution or fulfillment.